Posted on 04/05/2003 4:28:44 PM PST by TLBSHOW
Calling the conservative bluff
By John Mark Eberhart, Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)
What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News By Eric Alterman
Coulter, Limbaugh, O’Reilly; oh my.
Goldberg and Goldberg, Buchanan and Drudge.
There they are: Ann and Rush and Bill, Bernard and Jonah and
Patrick and Matt. Seven of the most popular political pundits in America, their views on display in newspapers, voices crackling across the airwaves, opinions flying through cyberspace. And nary a liberal among them.
But now Eric has come forward to call their bluff. That’s Eric as in Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News. Alterman’s premise is that the conservative wing’s gnashing of teeth about a “liberal media” attacking core right-thinking values is highly dubious.
Alterman believes the strongest political voices in this country are conservatives. And have been for some time.
“[Their] entire case is a lie,” Alterman writes in this 322-page, heavily footnoted book. “... The myth of the ‘liberal media’ empowers conservatives to control debate in the United States to the point where liberals cannot even hope for a fair shake anymore.”
Alterman is a blogger for MSNBC.com and a columnist for The Nation, and he researched this book over several years while contributing to that left-leaning publication.
Unlike, say, Slander, the slipshod attack on “liberal lies” by conservative author Ann Coulter, What Liberal Media? comes off as authoritative and thorough.
Not that Alterman isn’t passionate: He is incensed about conservatives who demand “fairness” from the media while they feel free to serve up balderdash.
Alterman cites a case involving MSNBC’s Chris Matthews—who is no liberal despite once having accepted a paycheck for a while for being a spokesman for Tip O’Neill.
During the Clinton impeachment, Matthews, Alterman writes, “was interviewing Kathleen Wiley, who had accused Clinton of fondling her in the Oval Office.” This was on Matthews’ daily show Hardball.
Veering off the subject of Wiley and Clinton, “[Matthews] made a startling accusation that a man who threatened Wiley while jogging near her home was actually Cody Shearer, the well-known writer and friend of the president.”
There appeared to be no evidence for Matthews’ fantasy; Shearer had been in California when Wiley had been threatened and could prove it. Yet the “conservative media”—get used to that phrase, because Alterman believes it is the more accurate term—got hold of the “story” and tossed it around gleefully:
“Rush Limbaugh then picked up the accusation, and Matthews repeated it on a second night, again with no evidence.”
Result: Shearer began getting threatening phone calls. A man with a gun showed up at his home—and this time, there was no doubt about the identity: He was “Pat Buchanan’s emotionally troubled brother, Hank.”
Matthews “had not even tried to verify Wiley’s story or Shearer’s identity,” Alterman writes. And Matthews “refused to apologize, until he received a threatening letter from Shearer’s attorney.”
Despite such news “judgment,” conservative pundits mostly get away with it, according to Alterman.
As Alterman writes: “‘Repeat something often enough and people will believe it,’ goes the adage, and this is nowhere truer than in American political journalism.”
They get away with it, he thinks, partly because of the changed nature of American media, specifically, because the days of the family-owned newspaper, the independent TV station, the rebel radio station rabble-rousers, are almost over.
Instead, the US media now are largely owned by corporations, which exist to make profit, Alterman says. He argues that they are also run, typically, by individuals who are wealthy and whose media outlets often reflect conservative policies, at least in the economic sense. In other words, can you say “Rupert Murdoch”?
Alterman also challenges the conservative theory that most reporters are liberals. Yes, some are. But Alterman contends that the 1996 Freedom Forum poll that questioned journalists about their political leanings—the poll often cited by the Right in its claim that a “liberal media” exists—was shot through with so many problems of method that it’s virtually useless. He argues most convincingly when he cites the fact that only 139 of 323 questionnaires mailed out were ever returned—“a response rate so low that most social scientists would reject it as inadequately representative.”
Such diligence seems sharply in contrast with Coulter’s approach in Slander, in which she haphazardly offered her opinion that the “liberal media” despises conservative darling Phyllis Schlafly. Check her footnotes, though. Her evidence for the alleged anti-Schlafly bias was based on a movie critic’s negative notice of The Muppets Take Manhattan—not exactly a pinnacle of filmmaking—in which Schlafly had a cameo.
Still, the “liberal media,” according to Coulter and other hardcore conservatives, is the bane of patriotic America, the root of all that is wrong with this country.
Alterman has written a compelling answer to that viewpoint. The best-selling political books in this country right now are penned by conservatives, including Coulter and Bernard Goldberg, author of Bias. Of course, the best-seller lists of late also have featured Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men. With What Liberal Media?, Alterman has penned a book much more grown up than Moore’s shtick. It remains to be seen, though, whether it will find as large an audience.
Translation: I like what Alterman says, but I hate what Coulter says.
Another plea for attention for Alterman? Another chorus of, "Who are you going to believe — me, or your lying eyes and brain"?
Dan
Let's see how well this venture fares, shall we?
Another two word rebuttal; Katie Couric.
Alterman admits that the immature among US made Moore's shtick a best seller. And it sounds like he doesn't have much hope for Alterman's book.
At least he got one thing right; Liberals are childish PoS.
Grown-ups are in charge, now. Thank God.
Alterman believes the strongest political voices in this country are conservatives.
He's right, they are.
But that is despite the media, not because of it.
The left's problem isn't that they don't have a medium, but that they don't have a message.
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